Brain degradation. What to do?

Senile or senile dementia, also known as senile dementia or dementia, is a mental disorder that develops in people with age. It is characterized by pronounced and rapid aging of the brain. The disease affects approximately 5% of people over 60 years of age and more than 20% over 80. Dementia most often affects women: for every sick man there are 2-3 women.

The disease significantly reduces quality of life, but does not directly affect life expectancy. However, there are still risks: for example, the risk of getting injured at home increases.

Causes of senile dementia

The causes of the disease are not fully understood, but it is known that a number of factors influence its development:

• unfavorable heredity;
• disruption of the immune system;
• somatic diseases, for example, atherosclerosis;
• infectious diseases, such as encephalitis or meningitis;
• various types of intoxication;
• oncological diseases;
• mental illness;
• traumatic brain injury and brain surgery;
• stress, overwork, psychological trauma, nervous shock, etc.

Development of senile dementia

Senile dementia develops unpredictably, but the younger the patient, the faster the disease usually progresses. All stages can pass in either 6 months or 10 years.

Stages of senile dementia

1. Initial
   . Mental and mental activity decreases: memory problems appear, the patient remembers new information worse, and cannot think logically. But at the same time, he can fully serve himself and retains the ability to self-criticize. This stage is also characterized by the strengthening of certain character traits, for example, if it has always been important for a person to keep his house clean, he may begin to clean several times a day.
2. Moderate.
   The disorders progress, patients lose interest in what was once important to them, lose the ability to independently care for themselves and perform some household tasks. Due to memory problems, a person may forget to close the door, turn off the stove, or cannot pay for purchases at the checkout. The emotional state of the patient is also disturbed, he becomes more selfish and callous, and practically does not show emotions. But he can still perform some simple actions, such as washing and dressing.
3. Heavy.
   The patient completely loses the ability to care for himself, his memory deteriorates so much that he ceases to recognize his family and friends.

Symptoms of senile dementia

1. Memory disorders.
   First of all, new information and new skills are forgotten, and short-term memory suffers. As the disease progresses, the number of disturbances increases; the patient may forget his name, important facts of his life, his friends and relatives.
2. Loss of orientation in time.
   Patients may perceive themselves as young and behave according to this age, for the same reason they do not recognize themselves in the mirror. They confuse those around them with people who were with them at one time or another. In some cases, patients begin to idealize the past, and events occurring in the present may be considered not worthy of attention.
3. Insomnia.
   Patients cannot sleep and try to fill the time by doing some housework, for example, they can start cooking or even rearranging.
4. State of alarm.
   Patients feel that they are being robbed, killed (including relatives), and are being pursued by strangers. With these complaints, they can seek help from passers-by or the police. In an attempt to protect himself from relatives, whom the patient takes for enemies, he may run away from home or hide all his valuables in a safe place both at home and on the street, and then forget about it.
5. Emotional instability.
   In the initial stages of the disease, patients may experience sudden mood swings, although irritability and stubbornness are most characteristic of the disease. In the final stages, they most often become indifferent to everything, even to the state of health of their loved ones. The emotional range decreases: people can constantly be in only one emotional state.
6. High suggestibility.
   Patients believe everything they hear.
7. Strengthening character traits.
   For example, people who are inclined to save money become openly greedy, hoard unnecessary things, and blame others for unnecessary spending.
8. Various diseases and pathologies.
   Most often these are high blood pressure, cataracts, baldness, disturbances in facial expressions, gait, tremors, etc.

Brain degradation

Every day more and more people complain about problems with brain activity - about increasing absent-mindedness (i.e., the inability to concentrate one’s attention, to gather thoughts to solve some problems), about difficulties in remembering information, about the physical inability to read large texts , not to mention books. And they ask to give them something to improve brain activity in general and memory in particular. Moreover, paradoxically, this problem is typical not only and not so much for older people, whose brains are supposed to be weakened by age, but for people of middle age and younger than middle age. At the same time, many are not even interested in why this happens - they automatically attribute it to stress, fatigue, unhealthy environment, the same age, etc., although all this is not even close to the reason. Among my patients there are those who are far from 70, but who have no problems at all with either memory or brain activity. So what is the reason?

And the reason is that, despite any arguments, no one categorically wants to give up the so-called constant, round-the-clock “connection to information.” In other words, the accelerated loss of your brain functions began on that very significant day when you decided to be constantly “in touch”. And it makes no difference whether you were forced to do this by work necessity, languor from idleness, or an elementary fear of not being “on the level”, i.e. fear of being branded a black sheep, an eccentric among one’s own kind.

Back in 2008, it was known that the average Internet user reads no more than 20% of the text on a page and avoids large paragraphs in every possible way! Moreover, special studies have shown that a person constantly connected to the network does not read text, but scans it like a robot - snatches scattered pieces of data from everywhere, constantly jumps from one place to another, and evaluates information exclusively from the position of “sharing”, i.e. e. “Can this “revelation” be forwarded to someone?” But not with the purpose of discussing, but mainly with the purpose of evoking emotions in the form of an animated “burp”, accompanied by short remarks and exclamations in SMS format.

During the research, it turned out that pages on the Internet, as already mentioned, are not read, but are skimmed using a pattern reminiscent of the Latin letter F. The user first reads the first few lines of the text content of the page (sometimes even completely, from beginning to end), then skips to the middle of the page, where he reads a few more lines (as a rule, only partially, without reading the line to the end), and then quickly goes down to the very bottom of the page - to see “how it ended.”

Red - areas where the reader’s attention lingers the longest. Yellow - quick viewing zones. Blue and gray areas are not readable at all

Therefore, the most effective way to present information to the average Internet user is to display information in the form of an inverted pyramid (i.e., according to the principle “the lower, the less”) with the obligatory highlighting of keywords (so that consumers of information understand what is important and what is not very) and revealing no more than one thought per paragraph. This is the only way to keep your attention on the page for as long as possible. If, as you go down the page, the density of information does not decrease or, even worse, increases (as, for example, in this article), then only a few people stay on such pages.

My personal opinion is:

The Internet is a real drug. What is a drug? This is a completely useless thing, without which anyone can live perfectly well until they try. And when he tries, he becomes dependent for life - drug addiction cannot be cured

People of all ranks and specialties complain about problems with the perception of information - from highly qualified university professors to service workers who maintain washing machines. Such complaints can be heard especially often in academic environments, i.e. from those who, by the nature of their work, are forced to communicate closely with people on a daily basis (teach, give lectures, take exams, etc.) - they report that the level of reading and perception skills of those with whom they work is already low , year by year it falls lower and lower.

Most people have enormous difficulty reading large texts, let alone books. Even blog posts longer than three or four paragraphs already seem to most to be too difficult and tedious to understand, and therefore boring and not worthy of even basic understanding. There is hardly a person who has not heard the popular online saying “too many letters - can’t handle it,” which is usually written in response to a proposal to read something longer than a couple of dozen lines. It turns out to be a vicious circle - there is no point in writing a lot, since almost no one will read it, and reducing the volume of transmitted thoughts leads to even greater poverty of not only readers, but also writers. As a result, we have what we have—mass dullness.

Even people with (in the past) good reading skills say that after a whole day of surfing the Internet and maneuvering through dozens and hundreds of emails, they physically cannot begin even a very interesting book, because reading just the first page turns into real torture.

Reading simply “doesn’t work”, first of all, because:

a) I can’t force myself to stop scanning the text, looking for keywords in it and

b) the complex syntax characteristic of most classical, high-content or knowledge-intensive works is completely inaccessible, which is completely absent in the exchange of telegraphic “SMS burps”.

As a result, one sentence has to be re-read several times! The most outspoken people say this directly: I am disgusted/disgusted with myself.

But that's not all. Due to constant connection to the Internet, such human skills as the ability to return to once meaningful information, analyze what has been read, and connect the imagination sharply deteriorate. What’s even worse is that in 80% of cases, people go to the Internet for dubious entertainment, or get information from there that has not only zero, but negative cultural value.

At the same time, most people (especially young people) are so attached to their gadgets that if they threaten to be disconnected from the network for at least one day, they experience not only mental depression bordering on panic, but also real physical withdrawal, reminiscent of drug addiction. Don't believe me? Come on, turn off your soap dish COMPLETELY and try to live without it for at least 2-3 days

There is an opinion, which I fully share, that the ability to effectively perceive complex texts and read complex literature will soon become an elite privilege, available only to a special caste of people. This idea is not new, since Umberto Eco, in his novel “The Name of the Rose,” proposed that only those who can and are ready to perceive complex knowledge should be allowed into the library. And everyone else will be able to read only signs and the Internet.

In short, no pills, no supplements, no diets, no shrinks, etc. unable to stop brain degradation. There is only one thing that can stop it - stopping the flow of all kinds of information garbage into the processing system and daily loading the brain with so-called “useful information.” This process is extremely difficult, and for many people it is completely impossible. For many, the train, as they say, has already left.

Once again, briefly:

1. Gadgets that ensure your constant connection to information/Internet - smartphones, iPads, etc., without which you now cannot even go to the toilet - make you practically a moron with a sluggish, apathetic, barely thinking brain that is not able to think and analyze . But, like any drug addict, you, of course, are convinced of the opposite - that these soap dishes make your life unrealistically bright, rich, comfortable, etc., and you personally - a “highly advanced personality” who is always in aware of everything.
2. Thanks to these devices, your brain receives a continuous stream of all kinds of garbage around the clock, which pollutes your “on-board computer” so much that you are only suitable for performing the most primitive, low-skilled work. You are unable to speak, write, or read coherently—your speech is tongue-tied and filled with filler words. When telling someone about something, you have difficulty finding the right words, and when listening to someone, you quickly lose the thread of the conversation and begin to get bored and yawn. You can’t write because you start making mistakes in almost every word, and you don’t even know approximately how to use punctuation marks. But you are great at taking selfies (and other trash photos) and knocking on someone on Viber or WhatsApp.
3. In short, listen to the bad news: mobile communications should only be used in EMERGENCIES. For example, you arrived in an unfamiliar city and cannot find a greeter - you really need to call. Or you are late for an important meeting - it is really necessary to call, i.e. you need to configure your gadget only to receive or transmit the professional and business information you need. And the rest of the time your gadget should be OFF. However, I can imagine how uncomfortable you feel just thinking about it.
4. You need to be prepared for the fact that everyone around you, to put it mildly, will not understand you - they will tell you that you are greetings, completely cuckoo, that you have gone crazy, etc. Don't care and grind. Remember, you are a target for information attack and you need to defend yourself. As CBS News President Richard Salant said, “Our job is to sell people not what they want, but what we need.”
5. And finally, you need to relearn how to read books. Real paper books—get it? Don’t stare at your soap dish with a screen for hours with blind eyes, but read books. It will be hard, but you try. There is no need to force yourself - on the first day, read ½ page, on the next - a whole page, on the third day - 1.5 pages, etc. Keep in mind that the body will resist this in every possible way - it will feel nauseous, break down, and be tempted to do anything, as long as the brain does not strain.

I don’t wish you good luck, because that’s not what you’ll need.

A.N. Statskevich, Brain degradation // “Academy of Trinitarianism”, M., El No. 77-6567, pub. 21867, 03/07/2016, www.trinitas.ru/rus/doc/0235/002a/02352167.htm

Treatment of senile dementia

Senile dementia is incurable, but proper rehabilitation can slow down the progression of the disease and improve the quality of life.

What works well for senile dementia?

• Active lifestyle. Regardless of how you feel, it is not recommended to spend time passively. Occupational therapy and art therapy are used, patients can walk and engage in feasible sports.
• Regular proper nutrition.
• Quality sleep 7-8 hours a day.
• Drug treatment, we mainly use nootropic drugs, tranquilizers, antidepressants.

You can entrust the care of patients with dementia to Blagopoluchiya specialists. We monitor patients 24 hours a day so that no anxiety syndrome goes unnoticed. Our caregivers help patients eat, perform hygiene procedures, and undergo treatment. equipped with everything necessary for comfort and safety: handrails, ramps, all doorways and elevator openings are wide enough, and the floor has an anti-slip coating. It is important to us that every patient feels at home and maintains their health as much as possible.

A little about brain degradation

Have you ever thought that with age, a person with less desire and enthusiasm takes on any activity that is either unusual for him and requires the development of hitherto unfamiliar skills and abilities, or forces him to show a high concentration of attention? If not, you should definitely think about it, and here's why.

The fact is that habitual work and the performance of everyday functions, reading the works of favorite authors and watching favorite films, everyday communication with friends and family, the use of one’s native language in speech, routes traveled far and wide - all these things, unfortunately, cause the brain to degrade .

The brain constantly strives to reduce energy costs for its activities, and for this it creates programs that a person executes according to templates (by the way, other interesting facts about the brain and thinking can be found in our article “Unusual and non-obvious facts about thinking and its development”) .

Such programs have been known for quite some time. For example, back in the mid-19th century, the German zoologist and biologist Richard Zemon called these programs engrams. An engram is a physical habit, or rather a trace, which is left in memory by repeated exposure to some stimulus.

An engram can be compared to a path “trodden” in the brain by neurons from a person performing the same actions. The more often and the longer a person performs a certain action, the less energy the brain requires, because the load on it decreases with each repetition.

And it happens that the paths eventually become well-trodden roads and even expressways. This is expressed in the quality and speed of the action performed. An example would be virtuoso guitar playing, absolutely touch typing on a keyboard, or first-class card manipulation.

Yes, on the one hand, it’s great to have such skills, because why waste extra energy to carry out the same type of actions that have already been brought to automaticity, and the brain doesn’t need to strain at all. But there is also a downside - due to the above, the brain begins to lose its plasticity.

Here you need to understand that the longer a person uses engrams, the less the basal ganglia of the brain are used, which are responsible for the production of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which helps neurons create new neural connections in the midst of the information noise of the brain (you can feel this information noise, for example, now - when read this sentence (a person is very rarely aware of this noise).

Imagine yourself going to school or work. If you always choose the same route for this and do it for six months or a year, your actions become automatic. And in parallel with these actions, you can perform others, for example, cleaning, knitting, listening to something, etc.

So why do you need to change the usual way of things? It's simple - because life itself is constantly changing, and these changes are beyond our control, no matter what we do. And almost always we have to adapt to them. The ability to adapt is a guarantee that, if necessary, we can always adapt to the necessary conditions without harming ourselves and begin to feel comfortable again.

Life is full of surprises: you can be fired without even warning, or given a bunch of new responsibilities; You may urgently need to change your place of residence or quickly learn new skills; there will be a need to learn a foreign language in the shortest possible time or learn to drive a car, etc.

How quickly a person “gets used to” all this depends on the plasticity of his brain. Therefore, it must be constantly maintained, otherwise the gray matter will begin to harden like concrete, and over time it will even turn into a piece of stone. Would you like this? We think not.

You don’t have to go far to find an example of “petrified” brains - just look at elderly people aged 70-80 years who do the same thing year after year. They are often completely unable to learn how to use the electronic controls of a washing machine and react with hostility to everything new. There is no need to talk about any new neural connections here, because the brain is ossified and it is almost impossible to stir it.

So if you want your brain to always be active, and your thinking to please you with its speed and sharpness, try to support the process of the emergence of new neural connections, let your brain cells pave new routes. Be mindful of engrams and don't let habit get the better of you. And to make all this easier, use ten simple ways in everyday life to prevent mental degradation.